


Everdunes: The Prophecy

by Mlah Sihfay (Letterblade)



Series: the dark myst vignettes [1]
Category: Myst Series
Genre: Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-05
Updated: 2004-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-12 00:20:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5647102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/pseuds/Mlah%20Sihfay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prologue, in which two boys hear a story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everdunes: The Prophecy

**I — Everdunes**

_The Prophecy_

 

Pran had passed the boundary of life, stumbled beyond the watered lands and the plant-bearing sand, and now she shuffled across bare and lifeless dunes. The faint trail she followed led her into the deep desert, into the _shel-hakat_ , the dead sand, the waterless sea that stretched for unknown miles. And that sea was blowing up into storm.

At least Pran could comfort herself: her people, the tribe her brother led wisely and well, were safe. Fareh, their sister, had taken all the people to the caves to wait out the storm, and would have taken Pran as well, but nothing could have kept her from her brother. Even the smallest child knew what the every-which-way howls of wind and the roiling brown cloud on the horizon meant: soon the sand would fill the air and black out the sun, fill the mouth and nose and ears of any unfortunate in its path, shred cloth, grind flesh from bone.

But Pran was out, walking into the heart of the storm, because Astair, her brother, the heart of the tribe, was missing. Just wandered off, she was sure, to meditate upon the problems of the tribe--the stomach illness in some of the children, the need to sink a new well. On a fair-weather day she would have let him go; Astair was a strong man, a survivor like all his people, and was always back soon enough from his roaming moments of solitude. But not into a storm. She had to bring him back from that.

Pran, stumbling into the deep desert and the distant outskirts of the storm, clutched the black shroud of her robe against her face as the scurrying sand rose higher, almost to her waist now. The footprints she had followed were lost, washed away, and she knew it was a miracle they had led her this far, but she still saw nothing but sand and sky and began to despair. _Karazen_ , the empty waste, the impersonal constant of the desert. Nothing but _karazen_.

"Astair!" she shrieked into the wind. Her desert-creature instincts were telling her to run while she still could. "Astair!" Or, if it was too late, to hide, burrow deep under a rock and pray for the slim chance of survival, for enough clean air to breathe until the storm blew past. " _Astair!_ " She tracked the sun without thinking and saw it was already fading into the cloud of sand; that was her last vestige of direction in the whirlwind, and when it faded, so did any chance of finding her way back, no matter whether she found her brother. Her cries of his name faded; grains of sand caught in her long eyelashes and trickled down her face like tears.

Cloth, soft from wear and thick-grained with sand, brushed unseen against her bare toes. She knelt to disentangle the rag from her sandal, and when her fingers slid over the embroidered hem, grief fell into her heart like a stone in muddy water. It was barely a hand-span of torn black robe-cloth, yet she knew the pattern of stitches, remembered the silky white thread, for she had sewn it herself, curled in the entrance to a cavern on a long dusty day while her brother watched, carving a dipper and smiling.

"Astair...no..."

A roar came from the horizon.

Pran looked up and screamed, no words left to her.

The storm was upon her. Sand whipped high into a giant cloud, engulfing the sky and the sun itself, until her world was nothing but brown air. Darkness washed across the dunes, and her black robe whipped in the wind, nearly dragging her off her feet. She clutched the rag to her chest, refusing to give it back to the storm, and squinted her eyes tight against the flying grains of sand that could blind her.

From the cloud came a sharp and unnatural clicking, faint, increasing.

Pran staggered to her feet and backed away in spite of herself as the sand began to pepper at her. This wasn't even the heart of the storm yet, she knew; perhaps she could still escape, if she remembered where to run. But she couldn't. Not until she knew where Astair was. A sharp gust of wind knocked her off her feet and slammed her into a rock behind her, winding her. She lay still and huddled, panting, cradled by the shifting sand. Sand clogged her mouth.

_Ishah-hakat-na drazhkele koro-kateh shalah. Shalah, shalalile._ She could not speak the words aloud, into this wind; she spoke them within instead, pressing the scrap of Astair's robe against her heart. _Let me pass from here to the Place of Water in peace. Peace, peace be to all._ The final prayer, the last absolution, of one who knows she is to die.

Pran spat out the sand and started pulling herself to her feet against the rock. She could die now; she had accepted death; and so, she swore to herself, she could find her brother without fear.

A limp, black-shrouded form collapsed in front of her, as if the storm had dropped it at her feet out of its unseen depths, and she fell back to her knees.

"Astair." Despair wrung it out of her; the wind whipped it away and the sand rushed down her throat, scratching until she thought she might spit blood. Croaking, she reached out for him, tugging at his robes, trying to expose his face.

And when she saw him, she screamed again.

His face was slashed open to the bone as if by a giant blade--down the center, across the eyes, across the mouth. Across the throat. Astair was dead, her beloved brother was dead, and she clutched her robe over her own face, on verge of retching, terribly sure she was to follow him and his path to the Place of Water.

The clicking was closer, louder, above her, and she squinted out from a fold in her robe, shaking.

A long, articulated, shining black claw reached out from the curtains of blowing sand, reached down to brush across Astair's ruined face, and the sharp and jagged edge of it, like a pair of scissors, could have torn through human flesh like a knife through cloth.

There was no prayer left to her now; she had spoken the last, and there were no more words of comfort, of protection, so her lips moved in blank silence. The rest of the creature slowly unfolded forth from the sandstorm--taller than a man, plated like an insect in the shining black stuff, with two arms and two legs like a man, but each with more joints than a human, and its swift and smooth motion was like that of no animal she had ever seen. Its long-snouted, angular head swung slowly, jagged mouthparts working back and forth and clicking like a snap of fingernails, but far, far louder; its eyes were glinting domes set above its head, with swirling colors in their depths like an oil slick in the sunlight.

And, suddenly, she knew what it was.

_The prophecies_. Her legs gave out and she crumpled flat to the sand, her face inches from her brother's. _The_ menazh, _the creatures of_ shel-hakat _, the life-but-not-life of a lifeless place--they shall kill the heart of the tribe before the southern tide--_

Astair, the head and heart of the tribe, lying dead on the dead sand. And the black creature--

" _Name us_ ," spoke a bodiless voice that groaned like the wind itself.

"The Choctic," she croaked, barely able to hear herself, and this time she did taste blood in her mouth. "The Choctic!"

" _Then speak of our return. Go._ " The storm winds howled soulless around her. " _Go alive and speak of us._ "

Pran drew back like an animal to huddle against the rock and clutch her robe across her face again, robbed of the courage even for sight. The creature, the Choctic, drew back; she could hear its constant clicking receding

She realized the storm was dying down, as if it was commanded by the Choctic's very presence. And with the clicking was a rustling, the sound of cloth and body being hauled through sand. Tears left muddy trails down her face.

_They're taking him away. They won't even let us have his body._

* * *

Pran paused in her telling and looked into the fire, her desert-weathered face in shadow and her dark eyes closed in sorrow.

"That was how they came, Atrus," she said quietly, the soft D'ni words harsh and stumbling on her tongue. "The prophecies are as old as our people. That the Choctic come, that they first kill the heart of the tribe..." Fareh, her sister, narrower of face and longer of hair, put her arm around Pran's tough and trembling shoulders and murmured a few words of comfort in their own angular and water-rushing language. "He never said who might take his place, so I chose to, and the tribe accepted me, for I am his sister. That was the first time they came, and that was how it happened. It has been two years, and they have come nine times since. Every time..." A long shudder ran through her body. "The sun goes dark with storms. And one of us dies. They always take the body." Fareh deepened her embrace, and Pran let her head fall upon her sister's shoulder. "They always take the body."

Atrus watched, chilled to the bone--and, in spite of himself, fascinated by what had emerged from an Age he had thought simple and unconflicted, an experiment in desert survival--but before he could fumble out words of comfort for their sorrow he was interrupted by a whisper from the other side of the tent.

"Look to your child, Atrus," Pran said, her voice thick with a peculiar sort of guilt. "I didn't know he was awake."

Sirrus, true, was still curled up asleep in the sand, his small form barely visible under a heavy blanket, but Achenar was wide awake, half-crouched and leaning against a stool, staring into the fire with huge brown eyes.

"His _face_..."

"Achenar..." Atrus cast a worried look at Pran, then rose and went over to gather Achenar into his arms. His presence startled Sirrus awake; he emerged from the blanket like a turtle and squinted around the dark tent with bewilderment.

"Father, can we go home soon?"

"Soon, Sirrus, don't worry." The younger boy subsided back into his blanket, then started rustling about the floor of the tent, trailing it after him. Achenar buried his face in his father's shirt, and Atrus stroked the dark hair, trying to soothe him, acutely aware of the awkwardness of comforting his own child about a nightmare that he, unlike Pran and Fareh, had the luxury of waking up from with a mere touch of a linking panel. "It will be all right, Achenar."

"His _face..._ "

"You don't have to worry about it."

"But--" Achenar stammered at what to say next, then fell silent when Pran spoke and tugged himself up to look over Atrus' shoulder at her.

"Garn the Prophet once said that during the time of the _menazh_ , this time, a man would come from another world and aid us for a while. He also said that man would bring his two sons, and one would remember the Choctic, and one would not."

Sirrus stopped being a blanket-caterpillar and poked his head out again. "What're you talking about?"

Pran laughed softly. "Nothing for you to worry about." Sirrus pouted at that and withdrew. "But neither child," Pran went on, "would ever be touched by the _menazh_ or see any of the creatures from the _shel-hakat_ , though the one would see other things with open eyes. So your father is right, Achenar. It will not hurt you."

"Is everything he said real?" asked Achenar, sounding only a little less frightened.

"The prophecies? Child, your father proved to me they were true. The _menazh_ is not impossible to imagine to our people. It is a thing we know, even if we only know it from legends and dreams. But a man from another world? We could not have imagined that, and yet Garn the Prophet saw it. Nobody thought that would come true, but it did."

"But it's just linking. It's not impossible." Atrus kept stroking his son's hair, wondering that he was so much like himself when he was small, always asking questions. But Achenar had been raised with books and Ages; linking to him was as natural as walking.

"But we thought it was. We can imagine what might come out of a world we know, even out from the _shel-hakat_. We could not imagine another world entirely, and so we thought it couldn't possibly be real."

"What do the rest of the prophecies say?" Atrus asked quietly.

Pran gave him a long, inscrutable stare, and Achenar looked back and forth between them in bewilderment, and Fareh whispered more foreign words into her sister's ear.

"There is not much more," Pran said at last. "He died before he can see everything. We will live in peace again one day. The _menazh_ will damage us, perhaps uproot us, but not destroy us. The price of that peace..." She looked away, and her voice grew heavy with some untold knowledge. "That I do not know."

* * *

Twenty years later, two brothers stood together upon a dune, surveying the empty sand from horizon to horizon.

"Maybe they moved after Pran died," Achenar said at last.

"Or maybe the Choctic killed them all," Sirrus responded. "I didn't think you cared."

"You don't remember Pran. You were younger than me. You don't know anything about it at all."

"And you've been different since Whiterock, dear brother." Sirrus, with only a hint of smugness, turned to squint at him instead of the horizon, sweat beading on his temples. "Maybe you've finally realized that you'll die someday."

Achenar giggled, high and bitter. "Oh, I've known I was going to die ever since I first dreamed it. You didn't change that. Whiterock didn't change that. _You_ were the one who never figured it out." He turned away from his brother.

"Achenar," Sirrus purred, pulling the linking book to Myst from the bag slung over his shoulder, "our destiny awaits."

"I can see her face," Achenar murmured, as if his brother wasn't even there. "I can see the blood. Black claws in a sandstorm. They can't have buried her body. They wouldn't have it."

Sirrus watched the back of his head apprehensively. Achenar took a deep breath, then turned and reached his hand out for the book.

"Right, our destiny. Dibs on the blue. Don't worry, I'll keep their shiny things for you." He giggled, then placed his hand over his shirt pocket for a moment, feeling the piece of white parchment, the vital missing page. "Time to send our parents home. Dear Mother back to her rags, Dear Father back to his rocks. Don't you worry at all, little brother. I remember all your plans."

They looked at each other for a long moment, a lopsided smile frozen on Achenar's face, and Sirrus frowned ever so slightly, his spine creeping in chills under the burning sun--for that had always been the gambit with all his plots, whether or not he could trust Achenar.

"Why the devil did you want to come to this wasteland at all, dear brother?" Sirrus asked at last, not expecting an answer.

"Had to see how the prophecy turned out," Achenar murmured as he reached for the book. "Had to see whether I..."

But the rest of his words were lost as he shimmered into the link, and Sirrus didn't remember to ask him about it until it was too late.


End file.
